News Item: ni0095-12

August 12, 2012

Libor Case Energizes a Wall Street Watchdog

By Ben Protess

Months after he arrived in Washington in 2009, Gary Gensler knew he had a big case.

Huddled around his assistant’s desk with a colleague, Mr. Gensler, then Wall Street’s newest regulator, listened to a taped telephone call of two Barclays employees discussing plans to report false interest rates. When the brief recording ended, Mr. Gensler realized the gravity of the wrongdoing.

“We need to make this case even more of a priority,” he told his colleague at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Stephen Obie, who already had been investigating Barclays for more than a year.